The Intimacy of a 17th-Century Band of Needle Lace Worked in Human Hair
Lauren Bradshaw, WPAMC ’25
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, an intimidatingly vast institution, is home to a small and delicate band of 17th-century needle lace worked in human hair. It is a bit difficult to locate as it sits within a pull-out drawer underneath the glass-encased installation of needlework by Martha Edlin in the British Galleries. The drawer, also covered in glass and lined with blue fabric, contains four additional examples of remarkably intricate lace from the 1600s including two lace panels, a lace border, and a cutwork sampler. Although none of these examples are even remotely large in scale, they significantly dominate the size of the hair lace. Hairwork of this era rarely survives due to its extreme fragility, and the maker and intended function of this band remain unknown.1 It could possibly have been intended for wear as a bracelet, as period literature suggests bracelets of hair were worn as sentimental love tokens or mementos of the deceased.
The imagery on this band is described as a hunting scene and depicts a dog chasing a deer while a bird sits perched atop a branch surrounded by flowers and various other foliage. It is worked in two different shades of lighter and darker brown human hair, outlined by a thicker fiber, which may be horse hair. A waxy substance secures the stitches in place as human hair has far more elasticity than the silk or linen threads that would have typically been used to work needle lace during this period. Needlework was an integral part of a girl or young woman’s education and she would have learned these skills gradually over time, starting with the most basic of embroidery stitches and eventually advancing to elaborate embroidery pictures and lace-making if privilege allowed.2
As Heather Hind states in a 2020 essay for The Wilkie Collins Journal, “Hair, being of the body, is synecdochic of an individual but becomes, in its separation from the body, a material capable of being worked into new forms, exchanged as a token of affection, and of reifying a relationship.”3 Hairwork gained in popularity during the Victorian era as Queen Victoria wore jewelry featuring the hair of both her deceased husband and living children. Mourning became a fundamental part of Victorian culture due to high rates of infant mortality, disease, and war.4 Eventually the practice of hairwork waned in popularity as the market became oversaturated and the tender intimacy was replaced with shallow commercialism. Additionally, at the beginning of the 20th century, Victorian death culture was seen as unattractively morbid, yet the craft has survived through a small number of interested makers, artists, and historians.
Reflecting on Victorian death culture and the sentimentality of hair also harkens back to a Delaware Art Museum visit we took before departing for our trip to England. We were given a tour of The Rossettis, an exhibition that ran from October 2023 through January 2024, organized in partnership with Tate Britain.5 The exhibition includes work by the entire Rosetti family, focusing on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, an artist who also modeled for numerous paintings including Ophelia by John Everett Millais. Siddal died on February 11, 1862 and a lock of her iconic red hair was encased within this tiny envelope marked “Lizzie’s hair February 1862.” The notion of sentimentality is further complicated by the fact that seven years after her death, Rosetti had her casket exhumed to retrieve and publish his manuscript book of poetry that he had placed inside during his initial mourning. Prepared and mounted by a student intern under the supervision of Winterthur conservators, the hair was first shown in London, and finally made its way back to Delaware for this exhibition.6
- Unknown, Band of Lace ca.1680-1640. Needle lace, worked in human hair, with thicker outlines possibly in horsehair. Victoria & Albert Museum Textiles and Fashion Collection. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O10701/band-of-lace-unknown/. ↩︎
- Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850. 1st ed. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993. ↩︎
- Heather Hind, “‘Pondering on That Little Circle of Plaited Hair.’” The Wilkie Collins Journal 17 (2020). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26996143. ↩︎
- Grace Duxbury, “Strands of Remembrance: Hairwork and Victorian Sentimentalism.” Morrison County Historical Society (blog), n.d. https://morrisoncountyhistory.org/?p=8040. ↩︎
- Delaware Art Museum, “‘The Rossettis’ Reunites Works by Iconic Family of Artists and Writers,” May 23, 2023. https://delart.org/the-rossettis-reunites-works-by-iconic-family-of-artists-and-writers/. ↩︎
- “Lock of Lizzie | UDaily.” Accessed February 12, 2024. https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2019/october/lizzie-siddal-pre-raphaelite-muse-winterthur-lock-hair-art-history/. ↩︎
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